There is a very seasonal and pretty spooky ghost story at Stageleft, see A Curious Incident.

Real or fake? Well, call me a sucker, but I’d say it’s genuine.

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So, following on from my recent gripe about quantum computing, it turns out that there are others who have thought along similar lines, and actually done the work of going beyond generalized grumbles.

Specifically, Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized posts about a paper by M. I. Dyakonov called Is Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation Really Possible? Dyakonov goes on about the theory of error-correction in (hypothetical) quantum computers, which I know nothing of, and in particular criticizes the "threshold theorem", but he also makes some more elementary points that I did, so here are a few excerpts from Mr/Ms Dyakonov’s paper just to show I’m not completely out to lunch.

The enormous literature devoted to [fault-tolerant quantum computation]… is purely mathematical. It is mostly produced by computer scientists with a limited understanding of physics and a somewhat restricted perception of quantum mechanics as nothing more than unitary transformations in Hilbert space plus "entanglement".

[on decoherence] While the relaxation of two-level systems was thoroughly studied during a large part of the 20th century, and is quite well understood, in the quantum computing literature there is a strong tendency to make it look as an obscure … Continue reading

The Flusher King by Peter Scowen, Toronto Star, Sunday October 22, 2006, p. D1.
Maximum Performance Testing of Popular Toilet Models,  7th Edition, Canadian Water and Wastewater Association.

The debate seems endless. The left says the
market doesn’t work; the right says government just makes things worse. It’s an old argument, and it’s time to get it sorted out.

The trouble is, this argument is always made in the abstract. It’s just
generalities. Principal-agent problems here, collective action problems
there, it’s just so much verbal diarrhoea.

If you’re going to have any chance of a realistic answer, you
have to get your hands dirty and take a close look at a real problem.
So that’s what I’m going to do.

And the best place to look? In the toilet. Or more specifically, in the
low-flush toilet which, after many years of messy failures, is now
positively flushed with success. What made it succeed? Was this the
innovation of private industry? Schumpeterian creative destruction at
work?  Or is this a case of state-mandated standards flushing away a
problem … Continue reading

Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling writes a very generous review of No One Makes You… Good reviews mean more the smarter the reviewer, so  this is very good indeed.

But the trouble with smart reviewers is that they spot those parts of an argument that you skate around, unsure of how thick the ice is. And while Chris is kind enough to call them "quibbles" his points are good ones. I know it’s Not Done to comment on reviews, but maybe I’ll make an exception here.

First, he wonders how widespread the market failures I describe are. I don’t know that there is a way to answer this question. A market failure does not always reveal itself in any obvious way. When eminent economists find it difficult to agree even on such empirical questions as "is inequality increasing in the USA", I don’t know whether we’ll see an empirical answer to the prevalence of market failures. And the costs of overcoming asymmetric information problems are sometimes hard to spot because there are so many different mechanisms. But there are a couple of observations that I can … Continue reading

In the Land of the Taliban – New York Times – Elizabeth Rubin

I’ve been working on a couple of short essays to put up here, but they are not quite ready yet. Part of the reason is that I’ve been reading this astounding piece by Elizabeth Rubin, who reports from Afghanistan on the state of that country. I recommend that you click the "print" button on the page, print off all 20 pages of it, and read it closely, because it tells you more about what’s going on than anything else I’ve read in the last two years.

Here are a few tiny pieces, chosen almost at random:

She talkes with one Abdul Baqi about an attack on the family of legislator Amir Dado, until recently intelligence chief of Helmand Province:

Abdul Baqi was also delighted by the attack. He would tell me that
Dado used to burn rocket casings and pour the melted plastic onto the
stomachs of onetime Taliban fighters he and his men had captured. Abdul
Baqi also recalled that during the civil war that ended with the
Taliban’s seizure of … Continue reading

I submitted this piece as an op-ed to the Kitchener Waterloo Record. I’ll post if they accept it.

Political debate in Canada is stale, swinging between those who
look to government for solutions and those who look to the free market. This
pendulum has swung back and forth on all the major issues: health care,
education, industrial policy, and on and on.

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he
founded is a timely reminder that many of the most promising ideas for a better
world are about neither governments nor business. The source of these ideas is
often the periphery of societies rather than the centre, and they work from the
bottom up rather than the top down. The prize is also a reminder that new ideas
are often difficult to classify: some claim that the ideas behind Grameen are
socialist, others that they are capitalist, and others that this is an
innovative form of aid to the poor. But most importantly, pretty much everyone
agrees that this is an idea that works.

The Grameen Bank was created at a cost … Continue reading